Sunday, January 25, 2015

Deflationgate a quarter century on

As we all know, Bill Belichek has transitioned
from football to quantum physics. It's hard to imagine too many going that
route but he has. Belichek, of course, was famous for attention to detail,
sub-detail, sub-sub-sub detail and so on.

What motivates him now, as in past years, is the
search for the secret of the deflated footballs — the accused if not accursed footballs from the 2015 Patriots
Colts AFC championship game.

A bit of context might be in order: Michel
Houellebecq, the erstwhile novelist, is now Premier of France, heading up the Paris-Vatican-Teheran
Axis. Some call it the Fifth Republic. Houellebecq prefers to brand it as a twenty-first
century Caliphate.

But Belichek could care less about geo-politics.
He obsesses, as ever,about football
and footballs.

Belichek has submitted a few of the suspect
footballs for examination at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, where he
now works, along with string theorists many decades younger. Some marvel at his
ability to grasp eleven-dimensional string theory.

Here, on this video, you can see the footballs
spinning around in the Collider at the kind of speed neither Tom Brady nor any
other quarterback could ever imagine.

Belichek can.

At Belichek's recent news conference I asked: "Prof.
Belichek, what do you hope to discover about the deflated footballs at the Hadron
Collider that you didn't know before?"

"They found the Higgs boson here," he said in that
unmistakable groany voice of his. "I'm not saying that boson in particular
was responsible. There are a lot of bosons. And then there are the fermions."

"Vegas favors bosons. You?"

"That's all I know. It's all I have to say. Go talk to
Tom Brady. Ask him what he thinks."